Tag Archives: Socialism

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Is Obamacare a spectacular failure because of incompetence, or by design?

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Private insurer participation in Obamacare exchanges, 2015-2016
Private insurer participation in Obamacare exchanges, 2015-2016

First, let’s establish that Obamacare really is a failed policy.

One of my favorite health policy experts Sally C. Pipes reports for CNBC (H/T Bree) on how private insurers are reversing their decision to sell customers Obamacare policies.

Excerpt:

Aetna the nation’s fourth-largest health insurer, just decided to stop offering plans on Obamacare’s exchanges in all but four states in 2017. The firm says that it was losing roughly $300 million per year on these policies. And it projected that its losses would only increase, since the share of covered individuals “in need of high-cost care” was growing, according to CEO Mark Bertolini.

Aetna isn’t the only insurer giving up on Obamacare. UnitedHealth, America’s biggest insurer, will sell plans in just three states next year, down from 34 this year. Humana will offer coverage in just 156 counties in 2017, 88 percent fewer than this year.

In other words, the insurance “death spiral” has arrived. Obamacare’s critics have long predicted that exchange plans’ high premiums and deductibles would keep all but the sickest Americans from enrolling. These people would need so much medical care that insurers would lose money no matter how much they raised premiums. Eventually, insurers would have no choice but to pull out.

[…]Insurers that haven’t pulled out of Obamacare are requesting premium hikes averaging 24 percent next year. And some states have it far worse. Many Georgians could see a hike of 65 percent. The 600,000 Texans enrolled in Blue Cross Blue Shield may face a 59 percent premium increase.

I must have blogged about 50 posts on Obamacare, and why it would fail, before the 2012 election. I even had podcasts and articles by Sally C. Pipes! She predicted all of this long ago. The 2012 election was our last chance to stop it, and we failed.

Obamacare premium growth, 2015-2016
Obamacare premium growth, 2015-2016

I always like to think about the future so I can prepare for it. Investors Business Daily thinks that if Hillary is elected, she will use this crisis to push for single payer health care. Single payer basically means that you pay into the government based on what you earn, and the sickest / least responsible people get a deal because they get “free” care. It’s a terrible deal for healthy, fit single men who never use health care. We have to pay about $10,000 a year in taxes, and never use it.

Investors Business Daily explains:

So what’s Hillary Clinton’s answer to the failing private exchanges? Get more people on government insurance through what she calls the “public option.” This would be a government-run health care plan offered in ObamaCare exchanges across the country.

“The public option, Clinton says, “will strengthen competition and reduce costs.”

But wait a minute. The “public option” was pushed by liberal Democrats in 2009 when ObamaCare was being built, and it was rejected by centrists in the party because it looked too much like a steppingstone to single payer.

As a matter of fact, that was the idea behind the “public option” in the first place.

As Mark Schmitt explained in the liberal American Prospect, “The public option was part of a carefully thought out and deliberately funded effort (to convince the single-payer crowd) they could live with the public option as a kind of stealth single-payer.” The idea was that the public option would be able to undercut private plans, driving them all out of the exchanges.

But all those centrists Democrats who opposed the public option are gone from the Senate, and if Hillary Clinton gets elected with a more liberal Senate majority, the public option will likely be top of her agenda.

With the vast Medicaid expansion, and the public option (as well as Clinton’s proposal to expand Medicare), it’s not far-fetched to say that soon the only people covered by private insurance will be the diminishing number who get it through work. (ObamaCare was also designed to shrink employer-based health.)

I guess my solution to this is to hang on to my employer-subsidized plan for as long as I can, and then if single-payer becomes the law, then I’ll just ease back my working. Maybe work part-time in a less demanding job. I don’t want to get up and go to work to pay for strangers, especially if their “health care” is just abortions, in vitro fertilization, drug addiction therapy, breast enlargements and sex changes – which is what happens in countries where the government does run health care. They just use it as a way to buy votes.

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Foreseeing America’s future: Spain’s Social Security system goes bankrupt

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Socialism in action: Youth unemployment rate in European countries
Socialism in action: Youth unemployment rate in European countries

I lamented the election of an outright socialist (Zapatero) as leader of Spain when it happened (in 2004, and again in 2008), and indeed he did nothing to fix the problems with unfunded entitlement liabilities in Spain.

Investors Business Daily explains what happened:

Spain is dangling on the edge of a very dangerous fiscal precipice. Not only is its government budget still deep in the red, but its social security fund is about to completely run out of money. Once that happens, the real fun begins.

As recent reports note, Spain’s social security fund will run out of money sometime in 2018. The reason? “Bonus payments” to pensioners, similar to expansions in Social Security benefits for current retirees and women that Hillary Clinton seeks to put in place in the U.S. Unless the Spanish government finds the money to patch the coming social security blowout, deep cuts in benefits or steep rises in taxes will have to be made.

And this is a problem that won’t just go away with improvement in the business cycle. “The financial problems are not a temporary problem,” noted Spain’s El Confidencial newspaper, as translated by financial advisor and blogger Michael Shedlock. “Revenue from social security contributions is not sufficient to meet payment obligations.”

How bad is it? Well, so far this year there’s a 12.24% deficit in social security contributions vs. the forecast. That gap will likely worsen in coming years, as more workers opt for retirement and fewer people enter the workforce. Payments to some people already deep in retirement may have to be cut — adding to the already disruptive fiscal chaos that has roiled Spain, despite its rebound from the financial crisis.

We have a similar problem in the United States, thanks to the Democrats. A long time ago, the Democrats created a Ponzi scheme called Social Security in order to buy votes of retirees today with money to be paid by younger American workers tomorrow. There is no Social Security fund, just buying the votes of one group of voters with the votes of a much less politically-aware group of voters (young people).

The same IBD article assessed the American system, as well:

By 2034, the U.S. Social Security program, too, will be bankrupt. We have one edge on Spain: We can print our own money. But as we’ve found over the past eight years of quantitative easing, that doesn’t exactly solve the problem. And anyway, while inflation is virtually zero today, there’s no guarantee it will be the same in 18 years.

[…]Today, the total unfunded liability of the U.S. Social Security program is in excess of $25 trillion. There are already 60 million Social Security recipients, with some 10,000 baby boomers retiring each and every day. Three out of five current retirees depend on Social Security for their income. Knowing this reckoning is coming and doing nothing is malfeasance of the worst sort.

In Spain, there is so little free market capitalism that young people cannot even find jobs. The unemployment rate for youth in Spain is second only to Greece – the same Greece that elected the socialists for decades. So young people cannot find work in either Greece or Spain. If the young people cannot pay into these systems at the same rate that people did in the past, that just makes them go bankrupt faster.

Millennials, take note. When you vote Democrat, you are voting to pay some of what you earn into a system that will not be there for you when you retire. I have paid into it, and it will be bankrupt long before I retire. And the Democrats are importing more takers (unskilled illegal immigrants, Syrian refugees, elderly family members, etc.) who will be taking more out of the system than they pay into the system. You are making yourselves into slaves because of your gullibility, listening to the lies that your teachers and professors tell you about who to vote for. Think for yourself.

The wonderful thing about having other countries is that you can look at them and see what happens when they implement different laws and policies. Socialism – of the sort championed by the Democrat party in America – has already been tried. It’s been tried in Greece, it’s been tried in North Korea, it’s been tried in Cuba, and in Spain. It’s not working anywhere. It’s not working here, either.

News

And now slavery: Venezuela’s socialist policies lead to forced labor camps

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Two socialists shake hands: Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez
Two socialists shake hands: Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez

How well are Democrat Party policies working out in Venezuela?

Here’s the latest from CNBC: (H/T William)

The government of Venezuela has issued a decree that “effectively amounts to forced labor” in an attempt to fix a spiraling food crisis, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

A Venezuelan ministry last week announced Resolution No. 9855, which calls for the establishment of a “transitory labor regime” in order to relaunch the agricultural and food sector. The decree says that the government must do what is “necessary to achieve strategic levels of self-sufficiency,” and states that workers can be forcefully moved from their jobs to work in farm fields or elsewhere in the agricultural sector for periods of 60 days.

[…]The law is vague in laying out exactly which workers can be forced to work in the farm sector, though it indicates that both public- and private-sector workers may be included. While working in food production, workers will be suspended from their regular jobs. They’ll be allowed to return to their original jobs upon the completion of service.

[…]Under President Nicolas Maduro, the country has been gripped by skyrocketing inflation and food shortages that have led to rising unrest this year.

Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy capsized with the fall in crude prices in 2014, leaving whole swaths of the country’s 31 million people without enough food or other necessities. Inflation is expected to hit almost 720 percent this year, and gross domestic product is seen falling by 8 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, left the nation in a vulnerable economic position by nationalizing energy assets while oil prices were high and spending proceeds on widespread social programs. Oil’s global drop in 2014 left the government far short of its revenue needs and with only an anemic private sector to generate taxes or jobs.

How did Venezuela get to this point where their economy is in such a shambles that they can neither produce nor even purchase enough food to feed their people?

Answer: socialism.

Here is an article from March 2013 from the radically leftist Slate. The headline is “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle: The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains”. The author is “a senior writer for the International Business Times”.

He writes:

Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.

What did Chavez do, precisely, that caused the Venezuelan economic to boom? Well, he nationalized private industry and redistributed wealth from job creators and entrepreneurs to the poor.

As The Week correctly put it, while “Chavez’s policies of redistribution and nationalization of oil assets endeared him to Venezuela’s working class” and produced many laudable results, the country’s “oil-centric economy has taken away resources from other areas that are badly in need of development.”

And now we know what happened after socialist policies were such as nationalizing private companies were adopted. But would you learn anything about what socialist policies actually do, in our government-run public schools, or universities, or in the mainstream media, or from the celebrities in pop culture?

In the United States, we ought to have an electorate that has more understanding of economics than a hamster does. Otherwise we run the risk of electing people who will take us down the same road to serfdom that Venezuela has walked under socialist policies.

Maybe instead of giving ignorant, spoiled millenials free tuition, so they can study English and philosophy, we should be giving them a 2 year missions trip to Venezuelan forced labor camps. They would learn a lot more about America and economics from that, than they would learn from Ivy League professors.

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